1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to the field of network telephony, and more specifically to devices, software and methods for determining a quality of voice connection between network devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
The internet is used for telephony, in addition to setting data. Accordingly, voice is encoded into digital data, the data is arranged in packets, and the packets are transmitted to the recipient over a network. The process has to happen in real time, which means that the familiar Transmission Control Protocol/Internal Protocol (TCP/IP) can not be used. Instead, other protocols are used, which permit real time use, such as the Uniform Datagram Protocol (UDP).
A disadvantage of protocols that permit real time use is that they are unreliable, in that they permit packets to be lost, without retrieving them. When that happens, the voice segments they were carrying are not reconstructed. If these are many, then the recipient hears annoying gaps in the reconstructed speech.